1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a display control apparatus, a display control method, an application and an operating system adapted to display objects as user interfaces by application software, and more particularly, to a display control apparatus, a display control method and a program adapted to switchably display objects associated with multiple languages.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, application software has been realized which supports multiple languages in one application program and can switch these languages and display bitmap images as user interfaces (see Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2001-142600, for example).
The application program according to this conventional art can support all languages in the world.
Incidentally, many languages are laterally written, and read in a direction from left to right (which is referred to as “normal sequence”) However, some languages such as Arabic are reversely read, that is, from right to left (which is referred to as “reverse sequence”). In the case of the language which is read in the reverse sequence as described above, it is necessary to display objects such as a predetermined sequence of bitmap images in the reverse sequence, in contrast to the case of the language which is read in the normal sequence.
It should be noted that “bitmap images” referred to herein refers to the bitmap images associated with general images, except bitmap images associated with characters.
However, the application program according to the above described conventional art or an operating system (hereinafter referred to as “OS”) such as Windows® cannot manage whether a sequence of bitmap images should be displayed in the normal sequence or in the reverse sequence.